Marysville Community Garden Broken Into for Fifth Time

MARYSVILLE -- Thieves broke into a community garden in Marysville for the fifth time this year over the weekend.

“So over on this side of the garden is where we feel like they actually came in,” Tracy Jacobson, who owns the garden, told FOX40.

Jacobson uses the garden to teach kids in the community how to work with their hands but earlier this week, she noticed two broken gates and fruits ripped from the vine.

“I noticed our shade garden where we have a lot of our succulents growing that we've been growing for the last year, were gone,” she said.

But Jacobson says thieves got away with much more -- tomatoes, peaches, cantaloupes and most of the produce kids in the community harvested on their own.

She says they also broke into a shed that stores supplies.

“This is the fifth time that we have noticed that it’s been broken into,” Jacobson said. “We know that people climb the fences almost nightly. It's hard not when there's fresh produce out here."

The garden has been around for the past eight years. Jacobson took it over in January.

“It’s a kids garden. The kids have done all the work out here. When we came in January, it was 3 feet deep in weeds,” she said.

Jacobson says most of the vegetables were destroyed, but she managed to salvage just a few.

Now, she’s hoping the people responsible for destroying the garden are caught soon.

"If you asked, we'd be more than happy to share but when you harvest the entire crop of 50 tomato plants in one night and there's virtually nothing left, you're harvesting not just for yourself and that's not fair," Jacobson said.